> But you can choose which company to be a customer of.
True, but I can't choose which corporations are spying on me. There are many corporations that spy on me at every opportunity despite the fact that I don't do business with them.
With the rise of pervasive surveillance, I think the choices we all make are going to cease to be important. We can be micromanaged into making the "right" ones. We truly become cogs in an uncaring, world destroying machine, with no more agency than rats in lab experiments. For people with a strong conformity streak, this may sound fine. If you don't like being told what to do, and don't like the direction of society in general, it's pretty dismal.
In retrospect this comment is hyper cynical even for me, and doesn't make a lot of sense that our choices wouldn't matter. I just can't get past the idea that my whole online life is there for someone with sufficient privilege to dig through. I feel so violated by the betrayal of mass surveillance because I invested most of my life into the internet thinking it was actually intended to be safe and egalitarian, not a spy machine and a tool for social control.
Also, corporations monitoring customers is not as scary as you make it out to be with your connection to the military. Yes it sucks. But you can choose which company to be a customer of. With the rise of corporate surveillance, the choices we all make about consumption just got another layer of importance.